Sleep apnea is one kind of sleep disorder. The male, the obesity, the alcoholism and those who reply on sleeping pills and sedatives have greater chance to contract the sleep apnea, wherein elderly patients' percentage is even higher than younger patients'. Sleep apnea patients often wake up during sleep due to breathing obstacles, and are able to return normal breath after waking up, then soon to back to sleep. However, the breathing obstacles may happen more than hundreds of times during a night, and the duration of time period would vary from second to more than one minute. Because of above reason, the patients usually have poor sleep quality, thereby decrease the effectiveness of work or daily life.
Sleep apnea can be classified as three categories: (1) obstructive sleep apnea (Obstructive Sleep Apnea, OSA), which is the most common one, has about 90% of patients belong to this category. The cause of OSA is the physiological obstruction being close to the soft tissue of throat airway, so that the upper airway will become narrow, and lead to have snoring and apnea. Upper respiratory tract structural abnormalities (e.g. bent nasal septum, turbinate hypertrophy, nasal polyps, hyperplasia, long uvula, adenoids, tongue hypertrophy, etc.), excessive airway muscle relaxation and obesity are also a cause of OSA. (2) Central sleep apnea (Central Sleep Apnea, CSA) is a kind of sleep apnea caused by brain stroke, traumatic impact or other problems; the brain of patient cannot issue instructions and lead to breathing sleep apnea. Another problem is the occurrence of central nervous system that respiratory message instruction conduction being abnormalities, so that the respiratory movements will have problem and stop breathing. (3) Mixed sleep apnea (Mixed Apnea) is a patient suffering both of obstructive and central sleep apnea.
One of current methods for preventing sleep apnea disease is treatment by surgery. However, because of the physiological structure of upper airway is complex, not every patient is suitable for surgery. In the common method, medical staff will suggest patient to have positional sleeping and reduce the intake of alcohol or sleeping pills for sleep apnea. It is difficult for patients to maintain the posture for whole night, so that the patients often rely on positional pillow to maintain the posture. There are some available pillows claiming for inhibiting sleep snoring, but those pillows are often designed to change the position of the user's head through height adjustment. However, the medical “sleep snoring”, especially refer to OSA, cannot be overcome only by changing the vertical position of user's head; therefore, the traditional methods are still unable to solve the problem of snoring sleep effectively.